Revolutionary communist party

Against the confusion and opportunism of Arsenal no. 9

This criticism is part of the struggle we have been leading for many months to repair the political damage done to the revolution by the Canadian opportunists.

The Revolutionary Communist Party completely disavows the ninth issue of the Arsenal political journal, published when the Party was still riddled by the opportunists. From now on, our distribution of this issue ceases permanently. The publishing of this issue in early 2017 served counter-revolutionary objectives and was a considerable step back for the communist movement in Canada. Our readers and sympathizers were left asking whether our organization had abandoned the struggle for communism and had transformed into just another appendage of bourgeois democracy. At that moment it may even have seemed, to our allies and some sister organizations, that the perspectives of this issue were the synthesis of the revolutionary action and the political gains of the proletariat in Canada. This is false.

The content of Arsenal no. 9 is completely alien to the conceptions and the practice of the Revolutionary Communist Party. The ideas and propositions it makes can only serve to disorganize the struggle for political power. They are the political justification of an opportunist practice that refuses to fight for People’s War. With this issue, the Canadian opportunists clearly reveal their rejection of the Leninist party, their revisionist conception of the mass line and their vision of reducing the revolution to a succession of struggles for reforms and inventing useless strategic prerequisites to the initiation of People’s War.

The content of Arsenal no. 9 in general

Before entering the heart of the subject, it is important to put the publishing of Arsenal no. 9 in context to better understand the reactionary plan it served. In the first half of this decade, the practice developed by the opportunists in the RCP allowed them to make a series of small organizational gains (Revolutionary Student Movement (RSM), conference of intermediary organizations, rallying of students, etc.), mostly in Ontario. This practice deviated from the one historically put forward by the RCP. It was carried out spontaneously, without political justification. During the year 2016 (a few months before the release of Arsenal no. 9), the struggle by the opportunists to consolidate their revisionist line and to isolate the revolutionary members of the RCP intensified. This is when it appeared necessary to put their practice to paper. It is in this perspective that the opportunist leadership prepared Arsenal no. 9, which would help impose their views to the entire party and satisfy their new student recruits. This was the first time the views of the Canadian opportunists were held in an official publication of the RCP. Before then, their ideas had been informally spread through individual interventions on personal blogs and Facebook pages. The release of Arsenal no. 9 marked a new step in the reactionary struggle led by the Canadian opportunists. From now on, they had to assume their liquidationist perspectives, and expose themselves to attacks from the revolutionary camp.

We find at the core of Arsenal no. 9 an opportunist proposition on the construction of the revolutionary movement (exposed mostly in the text “Communist methods of Mass Work”). This proposition is underpinned by a complete revision of Maoism. Arsenal no. 9 also contains a theoretical justification for this revision (presented in the introduction “Building a Maoist Party of a New Type” and in the texts “A Theory in Search of a Theory: on the post-Maoist drift” and “The Austerity Apparatus: some preliminary notes”). All this is accompanied by a lot of confusion, approximations and platitudes to confuse the reader. Under the guise of defending the new ideas brought by Maoism, the Canadian opportunists reject its fundamental principles (centralized party, revolutionary action, armed struggle, political initiative, centrality of the struggle for power, etc.). It is a pure liquidation of the political gains of our movement. At the heart of this revision is the rightist conception of the mass line which serves to legitimize the worst economist practices. This revision of Maoism opens the door to the import of post-modern nonsense, notably through the misuse and alteration of the term “masses” to designate anything and everything, except the proletariat and the working class.

The issue’s introduction sets the tone by calling for the construction of a Maoist party of a new type which, in opportunist lingo, means rejectingthe political and organizational gains of Leninism and replacing them by so-called new conceptions in line with their opportunist practice. The articles “A Theory in Search of a Theory: on the post-Maoist drift” and “The Austerity Apparatus: some preliminary notes” provide the theorization of the opportunists’ revision of Maoism. The first of the two texts takes the form of a call to reject post-Maoism. The author’s main argument is that the possibility of a creative conceptual development is inherent to Maoism and it is therefore useless to talk of post-Maoism. This argument, mediocre as it is, actually serves to justify the theoretical eclecticism of the author for whom Maoism seems to be no more than an intellectual playground. This eclecticism is most clear in the second text: “partisan war machine”, “movement ofmovements”, “singularity”, “multiplicity”,all pretentious and useless expressionsthat only weaken already clear and simple ideas (vanguard, communist party, political leadership, spontaneous movement, social class, etc.). In short, we can summarizethese two texts this way: there is no need to openlyadopt ideas alien to Marxism, because we can easily import these toxic ideas in the Maoist movement through the backdoor. The author’s recent book “Continuity and Rupture” (continuity with Badiou and Zizek, rupture with Lenin and Mao!), is the purest form of this creative theoretical renewal. It is a metaphysical exercise void of any concrete political meaning which consists in revisingthe history of class struggle andtransformingit in a sequence ofmetaphysicalproblems and revisionist categories.

It is in the text “Communist Methodsof Mass Work” that we find the coreof the confusion and the opportunist perspectives of Arsenal no. 9. More than that, of all the written works of the Canadian opportunists, it is this one which synthesizes their political line and their revisionist project the best. The release of this article was a counter-revolutionary maneuverthat aimed to impose the revisionist line by establishingit in an official publication of the RCP. This line ofputting reformsat the center of the present stagein the revolutionary process, ofprioritizing the development of anti-party intermediaryorganizations and liquidating the vanguard party in favor of an informal model trying to promotethe initiative of the masses, is nothing more thanan old opportunist perspective long rejected by our movement.It enablesdeviationfromrevolutionary struggle and itsimmediate danger, making it particularly attractive to careerist academics and other petty-bourgeois elements of the same kind.

Communist Methods of Mass Work

On a first reading, we are bored by all the banalitiesit contains: “Communists should endeavour [sic]to be ‘good people’ ”, “in the work that communists do, they should hold to their politics and principles”, “Simply put, if the masses are not organized there can be no revolution”, “Communists should respect elected leadership within the party and mass organizations”, “sometimes life allows for different levels of activity within the revolutionary movement”, etc. These platitudes remind us of the vapid text “How to Be a Good Communist” by one of the gravediggers of the Chinese Revolution, Liu Shaoqi. It is important to not get distracted and properlypinpoint the gistof the text. A careful reading of “Communist Methods of Mass Work” reveals a number of rightist ideas. For instance, we learn that there is novanguard organization in the country right now because there is no massiveand hegemoniccommunist party, that the party will create a united front with its own organizations, that the Occupy movement directly called into question capitalism, that the initiation of People’s War is doneby the bourgeois stateand that the strategic defensiveconsists in the defense of mass organizations.

“Communists Methods of Mass Work” contains the main propositionof the Canadian opportunists on the general development of the revolution. We resume it as such:

The party is essentially an empty shell; in reality, it exists only through the actions and development of anti-party intermediateorganizations;

The main purposeof these intermediateorganizations is to engage in reformist mass workand economist campaigns; this reformist work constitutes the majority of the activity of communists in the masses;

Revolution will progress gradually through a long series of struggles for reforms, during which intermediateorganizations will multiply and diversify;

At some point in the future, the bourgeois state will feel threatenedby the mobilization and campaigns led by this network of intermediateorganizations and will decide to attack them; the defense by revolutionaries and the masses of these organizations will mark the shiftto People’s War (strategic defensive).

“As our mass work becomes more successful and our party and mass organizations grow, we will inevitably come under increased state repression. […] The forceful defense of mass organizations and their activities against state repression can constitute the opening stages of the strategic defensive in an urban setting. In turn, insofar as mass organizations constitute the embryo of what will become the institutions of socialism, the ability to defend mass organizations is the basis for the establishment of dual power.”

Ultimately,it is the revisionist vision of the mass linedefended by the Canadian opportunists that justifies this unidimensional progression through reformist campaigns. This approach prescribes a gradual, step-by-step development to communists, putting the center of gravity of the present struggle on the emergent initiative of the masses instead of on the action and progression of the vanguard. It induces the necessity of building new organizations as soon as possible to replace the already existing ones and gather the politically “left-wing” elements (the masses!) in intermediateorganizations.

• Intermediateorganizations

The Canadian opportunists use the notion of intermediateorganizations to designate organizations separate from the party, with a weaker basis of political unity than the party, that do not struggle openly for revolution and whose political and organizational life are autonomous.

“Intermediate organizations have a higher level of political unity that a mass organization generally does, for instance they may be consciously anti-capitalist. However, intermediate organizations generally do not require agreement on a unified revolutionary strategy.”

“While mass organizations and intermediate organizations may be initiated by the party, they must themselves be autonomous organizations and internally democratic.”

The opportunists have created (or tried to create) a range of organizations of this type (Proletarian Feminist Front (PFF), Revolutionary Workers’ Movement (RWM), Fuck the 150, Anticolonial Action, Serve the People, Against Fascism collectives). The most successful specimen of this long series is without a doubt the RSM.

The way in which the Canadian opportunists have defended the notion of intermediate organizations is pitiful. In fact, they have erected as an absolute principle the haphazard and infantile method of organization employed when they formalized a group of students in Ottawa sympathetic to Marxism (which led to the creation of RSM). Since then, they have tried to reproduce this experiment and have spread its method all of their activities. To politically and historically justify the notion of intermediate organizations, they make a rightist reading of the ongoing revolution in the Philippines (with its popular organizations fighting for New Democracy) and the experience of the Communist Party of Canada in the 1920’s and 1930’s (from the Trade-Union Education League and the Workers Unity League organizing their actions in the working class).

If they do so, it is because they have discovered that recruiting students in organizations centered on democratic demands (or vaguely left-wing), with no real cohesion, easy of access and demanding little involvement, is simpler than building a revolutionary vanguard. Now, the opportunists try to justify their decision to take this easy route by making it a strategic necessity for revolution. According to them, this is due to another necessity: letting the initiative of the masses emerge (which is seen as an absolute priority of the revolutionary process) by making them progressively gain awareness of their capacities through a series of successful struggle for reforms.

“But principally, by taking on specific demands or campaigns and by winning victories, we can directly improve the conditions of the masses. In turn, this gives the masses a material reason to take us seriously (not in the sense of being taken seriously in the context of bourgeois ideological hegemony, but in the sense of giving the masses a real material reason to consider our political line).”

“In turn, winning specific reforms allows the masses to see that victory is possible,[…]”

According to them, this requires patchworkorganizations autonomous from the party which serve to make the masses participate without rushing them.

“How do we as communists handle the apparent contradiction between the necessity of the involvement of the masses in the revolutionary process, and the existence of a centralized vanguard party?

Another type of organization is necessary. Here we have what we call “mass organizations”, or those organizations that exist for the masses. […] They can be organized around specific issues or around specific demographic groups.”

“What about those individuals that are more politically advanced than the mass organizations, but are not yet willing or able to join the Party? Here we insert another type of organization, which can be called ‘intermediate organization’ .”

For the opportunists, thesenew organizations even constitute the embryos of the proletarian state: “Revolutionaries should use the mass-line to awaken the potential of the masses to govern themselves; the organizations formed in the process of struggle should form the basis of socialism.” And so, according to them, it is possible to start building NewPower before having initiated armed struggle!

The constructionof a large network of intermediate organizations is also coherent with their conception of a Maoist Party of a New Type. Following this conception, the task of developing a revolutionary vanguard based on the principles and basic methods of Leninism (democratic centralism, leading group, centralityof the struggle for power, revolutionary action, clandestinity, compartmentalization of cells, etc.) must be abandoned, having been discredited by history. For the opportunists, Maoism now offers a superior vision of the communist party and organizing in general. This new vision resolves the contradiction between the masses and the vanguard with intermediate organizations that let the masses avoid being dominated by the party.

“Party members and supporters must be involved in mass organizations and intermediate organizations, but they must not act in a commandist way inside of these organizations: commandism here could be seizing leadership positions and pushing a political line ahead of the political level of the organization’s membership. In turn, the party must incorporate the perspectives advanced by mass and intermediate organizations, and synthesize the correct perspectives into its own political line. In short, there must be a constant dialogue between party and mass organization, with neither overstepping the other in terms of importance[…]”

To assert, like the author, that the party has no more importance than the other organizations of the masses is in itself a negation of the leadership role of the vanguard and of the central position its actions take in the revolutionary process. Even worse, in a time where the party form is weakened by bourgeois democracy and the domination of petty-bourgeois perspectives, and where the spontaneous movement reinforces all other forms of organizing, this is in realityequivalent to attributing a secondaryrole to the party: supervising ongoing actions in the intermediate organizations (who, as mentioned before,are not openly communist and don’t struggle openly for revolution) from afar.

We consider this proposition to bealien to the history of the communist movement, to be equivalent to liquidating the development of acentralized revolutionary vanguard party in favor of a federation of small reformist collectivesand that it can only condemnthe revolution to defeat. The creation of intermediate organizations only puts useless obstacles between the party and the masses. The paradoxical effect of these organizations is to progressively push the masses further away from the party as the activity of its militants develop! Also, these organizations inevitably competewith the spontaneous mass movement. Of course, this mass movement has its strengths and weaknesses and is incapable, by itself, of leading to revolution. Ultimately, it is the action and the political leadership of the vanguard that can surpass these limits by bringing the question of the rise to power. However, artificially reproducing a parallel miniature of this movement is a useless strategic detour that can only divert revolutionaries from their present tasks, encouragingthem to involve themselves in economist struggles. The result can only be the annihilation of the strength and the capacity of the political vanguard. The task of the party, in regards to the spontaneous movement, is instead to develop new, direct revolutionary links with the masseswith no in-between.

It is true that Maoism develops and reinforces the notion of communist party. This development consists essentially in expressing clearly and consciouslythat the partymust lead the People’s War, which implies undertaking the objective and subjective transformations required. Our conception of such a party is of a complete communist party carrying outallthe objective forms of revolutionary action. To be able to leadPeople’s War, the party must use all of the means and principles developed by Leninism, not swipe them away with the back of the hand under the false pretense that “Marxist science has developed”! These means and principles arestill necessary today, as we are faced with the same problems that constituted the material basis for the emergence of Leninism (in fact, these problems have been reinforced by the strength of bourgeois democracy and the military power of imperialist states). To think that these problems have disappeared and taken with them the methods objectively necessary to overcoming them, to think that the most recent development of Marxist science calls for the creation ofa large network of intermediate organizations dedicated to the struggle for reforms, when these kinds of propositions existed in Lenin’s time, is to take a step backwards through history and to return to the organizational confusion… of pre-Leninist times!

What the Canadian opportunists present as new ideas are in fact old ideas that havelong sincebeen rejected by our movement. The notion of intermediate organization is an idea of appalling simplicity, born of the development of a confused and opportunistic practice in the political organizations dedicated to immediate struggle; apractice whichdeveloped in a period preceding or overlapping the creation of a communist party. Some militants then try to lay out theoretical foundations and formalize this practice to make it persisteternally. This notion, which inevitably springs from the infantile practice of confused organizations, is particularly strong atthe beginning of a revolutionary process. It condenses the spontaneous, unconscious and small-scale methods that communists discover on square one asthey start to do organizational work with the masses. These methods can seem adequate to the eyes of short-sighted militants who are impressed by the immediate gains they bring (relatively quick recruitment, for example) without considering all the challenges awaiting revolutionaries.

What is particularly upsetting is that the communist movement in Canada, and more particularly in Quebec, already made the necessary clarifications on this subject and rejected this immature conception a while ago. In fact, the same struggle we are leading today against the opportunist proposition of intermediate organizations had to be led in the M-L movement of the 1970’s. One of the most well-known and representative polemics of this period is the one the organization In struggle!led in the middle of the 1970’s against the Comité de solidarité avec les luttes ouvrières (CSLO). At the time, in Quebec, there was a process of unification of vanguard elements that was to end in the creation of a new revolutionary party. The methods of work of earlier years, marked by spontaneity and the refusal to engage in openly revolutionary activity within the masses, persisted onthe fringe of this process. Refusing to abandon these methods, partisans of the CSLO and other committees of the same type (political action committee, food banks, etc.) were forced to theorizetheir opportunist practice by inventing useless strategic necessities (organizing popular support to workers struggle, convincing the masses of revolution step-by-step by making them struggle for reforms, developing their initiative through economist campaigns, etc.) The historical answer of the M-L movement was to completely reject this proposition and advance towards the construction of a party. It ishard to not feel disheartened to see the same old opportunist notion reappear almost half a century later, this time presented as a great leap forward of Maoism.

Of all this, we learn that it is the infantile, confused and economist practice of the Canadian opportunists, combined with the refusal to abandon non-revolutionary organizational gains (like the RSM) that is the material basisof their vision.

• Reformist mass work

According to the text, the intermediate organizations developed by communists must help them accomplish mass work, which, in reality, is reformist workstamped with the term mass. It is defended that this work is “[…] any sort of political work that engages the masses.” while only the unidimensional perspective of the struggle for reform(build confidence in the masses by struggling for specific demands, put in place community programs, develop economist campaigns, etc.) is addressed in the text. In addition, the author explicitly asserts that right now, the struggle for reforms takes priority.

“Revolutionaries need to speak to the masses where they are at in ways that directly influence their day-to-day lives, i.e. on the concrete level of their daily experiences, which at this historical conjuncture largely takes the form of specific reforms or campaigns.”

In addition, the text givesimportanceonly tothe task of developing the initiative of the masses, without addressing the engagement of the masses in actionthrough other meansthan organizing economist struggle. We assert that the masses take part in economic struggles and resist capitalism spontaneously every day, without the intervention of communists. In reality, what the class struggle needs is the revolutionary political leadershipof a living and persevering vanguard to counter the dispersionand political isolation of the working class movement.

With objectives as vague as “1) to organizethe masses for revolution; 2) to keep us grounded in the masses;3) recruitment;4) amelioration ofthe conditions of the masses; and 5) to create a sense of community within the revolutionary movement.”, how could we imagine accomplishinganything different than all the reformist and community organizations in the country?We say these organizations set and attain about the same objectives and therefore, they are likely able to deploy a much better mass work (as defined in the text) than the Canadian opportunists. “Communist Methods of Mass Work”, in the end, reduces all strategic questionsof the progression and preparation of People’s War to the development of struggles for reforms and demands.

According to the text, it is sufficient to openly and consciously reject economism to not be economist. Even worse, it is asserted that no contradiction resides in the struggle for reforms and the struggle for revolution, and that reformist struggle becomes a revolutionary and political struggle when its leaders call themselves revolutionaries.

“It is only by consciously connectingthe struggle for a reform to the broader revolutionary struggle, and subordinating the immediate reform to the revolutionary process in an open way, that the struggle for immediate reforms does not lapse into economism.”

Of course, revolutionaries must seize the struggle for demands that exist independently of them. However, organizing a revolution is by far harder than developing economic struggles by copying the spontaneous movement. This is not a future hurdle: it exists right now. We must immediately develop the outside political struggle of the workers’ movement, which will allow the struggle for demands to ultimately lead to socialism. In the process of construction of the communist party, this is what we call the political preparation for People’s War. A communist party cannot magically transform into a party capable of leading People’s War and seizing political power if is built from years of reformist work. History had shown countless times that the organizations who took this path inevitably built something even worse than a house of cards: they built another appendage of bourgeois democracy. We defend the perspective of transforming fragmented struggles – condemned to failure without the struggle for power – instead of reinforcing them.

• The revisionist conception of the mass line

According to us, “Communist Methods of Mass Work” puts forward a wait-and-see, anti-Leninist vision of the mass line. The text asserts that the mass line is what organizes all of revolutionary progress. According to the text, revolution is equivalent to successively organizing different campaigns that gradually develop the initiative of the masses and their will to struggle. Each of these campaigns is organized following three metaphysical steps that show condescension to the proletariat: revolutionaries must 1) investigate among the masses, 2) formulate demands and 3) organize campaigns around these demands. Then, they must engage in consolidation work to durably accumulate forces. Intermediate organizations then serve to rally new militants as the campaign ends. This process, repeated over and over again, would lead to People’s War.

We consider this position to be equivalent to abandoning all activity and all organizational practice that goes beyond the opportunist frame of reformism and economism. The vision of the mass line put forward by the text completely eliminates the political struggle and naively simplifies the development of revolution and the construction of a revolutionary party. According to the Canadian opportunists, this grotesque collage of un-mastered categories is the heritage of the Chinese revolution and all the people’s wars of the last century. Still according to them, it is this “universal organizing method” that unconsciously and objectively originated all revolutionary progress in history. To us, the three metaphysical steps put forward by the text represent nothing more than the unidimensional adhesion of the Canadian opportunists to reformist work. Let us make clear that we doubt they have done one iota of investigation into the working classin their life.Chances are they have no knowledge of the proletarian and working class areas of the cities where they go to university. We, on the other hand, do not reject workers’ inquiry and investigations. We are much more valiant than the opportunists on this front. But we subordinate this day-to-day work to the development of revolutionary action and the future initiation of People’s War.

In addition, this “universal organizing method” contains the following opportunist deviations: 1) specialization in the pool of left-wing militants under pretext of elevating the political level of intermediate elements; 2) mirror presence as a way to discover and express the ideas of the masses; 3) economist campaigns to share the ideas of the party with the masses; 4) creating autonomous organizations distinct from the party to allow mass line to develop; 5) abandoning the centralized party in favor of a federation of small reformist collectives to avoid exercising a bureaucratic leadership over the masses; 6) rejecting the real spontaneous movement of the proletariat in favor of petty-bourgeois political movements; 7) weakening the term “masses” to include everything except the working class, etc.

Of course, we still consider the mass line an important contribution of Maoism. It is just to go “From the masses, to the masses”. Since our beginnings, we make slogans that materialize our understanding of the mass line. We say

that the workers are millions of heroes and heroines;

that it is politically important to learn from the real movement that produces society every day (i.e. work) and to participate in it;

that working class centrality in political struggle and socialism will allow us to resolve the contradiction betweenliving and dead labor;

that the masses clamortoorganizetherebellion;

that socialism will answer all the demands of the people;

that we must lead the struggle for power.

However,

the mass line is a method of leadership, not organizing; to be precise, it is the method that allows us to have the correct ideas on how to lead the masses;

that the mass line is a general and continuous political process which gives tools to the political leadership of the vanguard, not a recipe to collect grievances and formulate immediate demands, reducing political struggle to opportunist practices;

that “just ideas” are above all the reflection of material reality and experience gained by the revolutionary action of millions of

workers in Canada and across the world, not the result of petty-bourgeois ideological struggle;

that Maoists today do not start from scratch; they have the synthesis of the “just ideas” of the masses as historical background;

the necessity of totalizing the revolutionary action of the proletariat, of making the political experience of the communist movement penetrate the masses, of fusing direct and indirect experience to prepare People’s War is a product of the mass line;

more generally, preparing, initiating and leading the People’s War is not a democratic exercise: it is the enforcement of a change that is not unanimous, that doesn’t wait for majority approval, but which is necessary.

There are a thousand ways of bringing the masses to revolutionary action by starting from the reality of class struggle and the political conjuncture. Let us take, for example, the boycott of bourgeois elections we organize periodically. In reality, the proletariat already rejects bourgeois democracy, as we can witness by the constant reduction of participation rate from one election to another. We can say there exists an objective boycott; it must only be organized on a firmly revolutionary foundation.

Reading the text, we conclude that the Canadian opportunists make a rightist reading of past and present revolutionary experiences. Firstly, they confuse the tasks of the present period (which pertain to the preparation of People’s War) with the tasks that were appropriate for China during the People’s War (bringing the people in the armed struggle by supporting the combatants, developing New Power, transforming the daily life of millions, etc.). Secondly, the opportunists deny the existence of spontaneous mass movements for demands in Canada, and particularly those of the working class. At best, they find it uninteresting and useless. They essentially only recognize organized petty-bourgeois struggles. Even worse, they believe they must create new organizations and develop a new mass movement countrywide, movement that will necessarily be for demands. The revolutionary aesthetic won’t stop them from copying what exists spontaneously. We consider that the priority is to build a party for People’s War. The politico-military initiative of this party, the proposition of ascending to power, will produce the material basis for a real combatant attitude in the masses and will push the organizations of the masses to support revolution. In other words, the historical period, not subjective will, must orient our analysis of the spontaneous movement and of already existing mass organizations. Right now, to politically and strategically prepare People’s War, the party must develop permanent revolutionary action and dispose of its revolutionary militants everywhere the masses already are, and ideally where they can influence the greatest number. As such, they can resonate the activities and perspectives of the party in the real movement on a daily basis. In short, we are against the voluntary isolation put forward by the Canadian opportunists motivated by their class contempt.

If we rely on the text, the contemporary spontaneous mass movement is limited to what attracted the attention of bourgeois media or the intellectual petty-bourgeoisie: Occupy, the Quebec student strike of 2012, or even the anti-war movement. In other words, the author is completely blind to the daily struggle of the working class – and the proletariat in general – to resist capitalist exploitation and better their material conditions of living. Also, we will say that the movement which the author finds important are dominated by petty-bourgeois perspectives or, in some cases, have an almost completely petty-bourgeois class composition. Yet, in the last two years, the Canadian opportunists often faulted the party for being cut from the militant experience of the proletariat by not appearing in these petty-bourgeois movements. We can easily believe they hope a thousand Occupy will bloom and the party will federate them and reproduce them durably. We need only look at their recent activity to see tailism of the liberal left. For instance, they went so far as to completely adopt its rallying cry concerning the so-called rise of fascism. Also, using mostly social networks, they led a campaign against the 150th anniversary of Canada the same way as any other vaguely anti-colonialist student group. This is nothing new. Before our secession from the Canadian opportunists, the RSM militants were instigating a struggle for student general assemblies and other petty-bourgeois campaigns of the like (like the memorable campaign De Caire Off Campus), in addition to diving headlong into any fashionable left-wing academic struggle. For instance, they recently led a solidarity campaign with teaching and research auxiliaries (proletarians, according to them!) of York University during a strike led by Canadian Union of Public Employees (CUPE) local 3903.

Class struggle continues

The ninth edition of Arsenal reveals that after two hundred years of conscious and opinionated struggle, seizures of power, People’s Wars and real experiences of socialism, the Canadian opportunists rely on intermediate organizations and reformist work to link up with the masses. They believe these perspectives to be the result of a just and updated mass line. We deduce that our opponent believes that to avoid the chasm of revisionism that appeared in the communist movement of the 20th century, they must jump headfirst into it. To add to this delusion, Canadian opportunism claims to be the master of a creative theoretical renewal – a disguised adhesion to post-modernism with, at its head, a petty-bourgeois meta-physicist, his fellows and his sold-out readership.

Arsenal no. 9 is openly and definitively rejected by our party and all the partisans of People’s War in Canada under our leadership. We are aware that the ideas put forward in this opportunist issue are but a particular expression of the revisionist menace that threatens communism. This menace slows down revolutionary progress in imperialist countries and, ultimately, will signify its death if not strongly combated.

Proud of the path forged by the revolutionaries that made history, we consider the recent line struggle and secession of our organization as a particularly important event in Canadian class struggle. It has resulted in, on one hand, a centralized vanguard party, and on the other a federation of small post-modern reformist collectives. The development of the revolutionary action of our organization and the fallback of the opportunists on economist and reformist practices promise to widen the gap between us.